FEATURE: DISASTER RECOVERY
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Business agility has become
a critical enabler in today’s
digital environment, and
yet outages can take it
away with one snap of
the fingers. Kate Mollett,
Regional Manager for Africa
at Veeam, looks at what
you can do to ensure you
have an effective disaster
recovery plan in place.
I
n an age governed by information and
the ability to access it, unfortunate
incidents like those suffered by Liberty
Holdings, ViewFines and even Facebook
last year are a pertinent reminder of why
businesses can ill afford their lights to go out.
The ability to remain ‘always on’ is crucial.
But this is a challenge that is far from
simple to solve. Given the widespread use
of third-party cloud providers, guaranteeing
availability is not just a case of a company
having its own resilient backup and recovery
options in place.
Risky business
However, despite pressure to maintain this
level of high-speed functionality on behalf
of their customers, major cloud providers
continue to struggle with regular periods
of downtime and disruption when trying to
maintain service levels. These are choppy
waters. The knock-on effect of such incidents
can be extremely costly; our 2017 research
showed the average cost of downtime
globally for mission-critical applications can
rise to more than R–million per hour. The
average annual cost of downtime sits at more
than R301–million, which is not something
that many companies can survive.
How can businesses mitigate against
such a costly risk?
The best way to ensure survival is by being
prepared. Whether a business needs to
watch its own back or has responsibility to
the ongoing success of others, having a
plan in place to follow if an outage occurs
(that can help recover and get back online
quickly) is key. The IDC estimates that 80%
of businesses that do not have what is
defined as a ‘disaster recovery plan’ in place
will simply fail when an outage strikes, not to
mention suffer an almost incalculable drop in
revenue resulting from falling customer trust.
Putting plans in place
Companies must be able to trust that their
third-party providers are following suit. After
all, what would be the point of keeping
everything in working order if your staff or
customers still cannot access the services
they need? Thousands of companies have
little or no IT staff to depend on and are
almost entirely reliant on external service
providers to deliver what they need to meet
their agility goal.
So, what does a disaster recovery
plan look like?
Businesses can start their preparations by
first ensuring they understand where disaster
recovery sits within the context of their
overarching business strategy. This is where
an impact assessment comes in. Businesses
need to take the time to identify which
Successfully managing
risk in a digital world
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